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Donald Trump on Friday said “a lot of people should be ashamed” by contents of the recently released GOP memo. But if facts matter, it is the credibility of Trump’s allies that will take the biggest hit. (Pool / GETTY IMAGES)

“This is a scandal that will make Watergate look like a little spat in the kindergarten sandpit,” said former White House aide Sebastian Gorka.

The three men were talking about a then-secret memo, written by aides to Devin Nunes, chair of the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, that alleges the FBI and Justice Department committed wrongdoing during their investigation of the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

The memo was released on Friday. And it proved … the Watergate Three were being laughably ridiculous.

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The four-page memo not only fails to reveal a titanic scandal. It reveals no scandal at all. And that is even if you take it at face value — even though the FBI says it contains “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

The most astonishing thing about the memo is not some shocking new fact. (The memo contains none.) It’s that a partisan document, written by pro-Trump Republicans and declassified by Trump himself, actually ends up weakening Trump’s case that the probe is tainted.

James Comey, director of the FBI during the period depicted in the memo, is not a disinterested observer here. But his assessment was right on the mark: “That’s it?”

Here’s what the memo alleges.

When the FBI went to a special intelligence court seeking a warrant to conduct surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, an “essential” part of its application was uncorroborated information from the famous “dossier” produced by Christopher Steele, a former top British spy dealing with Russia-related matters.

Steele, the memo continues, loathed Trump and wanted him defeated, and he was being paid for his work by the Democratic Party. The FBI did not inform the intelligence court of the “political origins” of the dossier. FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe admitted to the committee that no warrant would have been sought without information from the dossier.

There are numerous reasons for suspicion of the memo’s claims.

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Page, according to news reports, had been a subject of FBI interest for at least three years before the dossier came out; a 2015 court case included intercepted 2013 exchanges in which Russian spies discussed efforts to recruit Page. It is unclear that the initial warrant application relied exclusively on the dossier — again, the FBI says the memo omits critical facts — let alone that applications for renewing the surveillance did so.

Further, Democrats on the House intelligence committee said Friday that McCabe never said what the memo claims he said. Nunes has a history of partisan distortion.

But even if the memo is believed in its entirety, it is nothing close to a bombshell.

Steele was already known to be opposed to a Trump victory (on account of what he saw as Trump being compromised by Russia). The dossier was already known to have been funded by Democrats. Judges, of course, found the applications sufficiently convincing to grant warrants.

“In the world of actual law, there needs to be a good reason for the judge to think, once informed of the claim of bias, that the informant was just totally making it up,” he wrote. “What matters is whether, based on the totality of the circumstances, the information came from a credible source.”

The memo itself notes that Steele had a “past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters.”

In fact, it is the credibility of Trump’s allies that takes the biggest hit from the memo.

Near the end, the memo says in passing that the FBI investigation was “triggered” by information from George Papadopoulos, the former Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with Russia.

Trump allies say the whole probe is poisoned because it started with a biased dossier. Nunes confirmed that this is not what happened.

The memo episode has dominated U.S. political media for much of an otherwise eventful week in American news. The blanket coverage is another testament to the oft-irrational power of the “secret.”

Had Nunes simply declared that he had evidence that the FBI asked for a warrant based on information from Steele, and that he had evidence Steele was no fan of Trump, he would have received little coverage. Only because the information was put in a classified memo, a memo framed as shocking by professional spinners, did it acquire mythical status.

It may, of course, end up being important despite its emptiness. Even as experts scoffed, Republicans continued to use it as a pretext for their attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

On Friday, Trump said “a lot of people should be ashamed.” Asked if he still has confidence in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, he said, “You figure that one out.”

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